


Habit

by Whedonista93



Series: Soul Mate AU [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 10:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5000515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whedonista93/pseuds/Whedonista93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He makes a habit of it, over the years - saving her.<br/>She makes a habit of it, over the years - asking why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Five Times He Saves Her

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah... I've been reading WAY too many soulmate fics lately. Have mercy on me.
> 
> No beta and translations are from Google, all mistakes are mine.
> 
> Definitely don't own anything.

_He makes a habit of it, over the years – saving her._

I.

He saves her from the Red Room. He never speaks to Nic directly. But she can always feel him, sometimes even see him, watching her. He speaks to her sister, though. He gives her sister specific instructions on how to train her. He makes Nic better, smarter and quicker, than the other girls. She soon even usurps her sister’s status as the Red Room’s finest (not that her sister seems to mind). And then her sister overhears a conversation about a mission. Her sister doesn’t tell her. Her sister tells _him_. And before Nic can really understand what’s happening, alarms are blaring and she’s running. He stops her. His arm, red light flashing off the gleaming metal, snakes out and drags her into a side hall. She flips him on his back before she realizes it’s him. Then he grins up at her from the ground before jumping up and sprinting her down the hall and shoving her toward a hidden air duct.

In broken, heavily accented English (and she doesn’t know why she chooses English, when Russian is her native tongue) she asks, “Why do you save me?”

A strange look crosses his face before he slams the grating in her face.

* * *

II.

He saves her from himself. Mere hours after Nic escapes the Red Room, Hydra sends him to find her. When he does, he gives her a bag full of cash, untraceable guns, concealable blades, and flawless I.D.’s.

She asks again, “Why do you save me?”

The grin from before almost reappears, but before she’s done blinking, he’s gone.

 * *

He saves her from himself. Months after they send him to find her, they send him to capture her. He captures her in London. He ties her bonds too loose. He sits too far away across the dingy hotel room. He unties her. He lets her have too long alone in the grimy hotel bathroom. He opens the door as she balances on the window’s edge, three stories up.

Nic meets his eyes. Her Russian accent is all but gone, “Why do you save me?”

He closes the door.

* *

He saves her from himself. Years after he captures her, they send him to kill her. He perches his rifle too far away across Chicago’s downtown. He misses the shot she knows he could have made anyway, even from too far away. Later that day, he throws his blade just enough too far to the left. That night, he buys her a beer. He laces it with a compound he insisted she build immunity to when she was still in the Red Room.

Nic has no accent anymore, not unless she wants to, and her English is no longer broken, but she lets both surface now, “Why do you save me?”

Again, the grin almost surfaces. He closes his eyes. She knocks him unconscious and leaves him in the alley.

* * *

_He makes a habit of it, over the years – saving her._

_She makes a habit of it, over the years – asking why._

III.

He saves her from herself. She is tired of running through the shadows alone. She is tired of so much blood and seemingly no progress. She is a bottle and a half of vodka in. A knife in one hand, and a gun in the other as she stands on the balcony, she wonders which would be the best way to go.

Then he’s there. His human hand closes around her arm hard enough to bruise as he yanks her back from the wall. Her knife is taken from her hand and embedded in a wall. Her gun is crushed in his metal hand. Nic is shoved under the shower head. He alternates between steaming heat and freezing cold, glares at her through it all, until she is sober and ashamed.

“Why do you save me?” she asks again.

Again, he does not answer. He is gone before the morning light.

* * *

IV.

He saves her from the fallout. HYDRA has fallen. A rebuilt SHIELD and the Avengers (unbeknownst to each other) search for all survivors. They do not find her. HYDRA, and the HYDRA infested version of SHIELD, have no records of her. She does not exist. He drops two thick files and a flash drive in her lap as she sits on a Malibu beach. She flips the first open and sees her own face, many years younger, staring back up at her. This is it. These are the _only_ files that exist on her. They are not duplicated anywhere (she was too valuable). She knows this.

“Why do you save me?”

When she looks up, he is gone and Nic is nothing more than a rumor.

* * *

V.

He saved her before the Red Room. She doesn’t know of it until HYDRA’s fall – when he drops her files in her lap. She failed their initial tests. She was too small. She was too weak. She was not fast enough. She was determined an acceptable loss.

There is one page, hand-written in broken Russian and English, outlining specifically why she was not an acceptable loss. One page outlining her potential – what the Soldier can turn her into. Reading it, she can’t help but think he’s talking about someone else. Someone he knows. (Years later, when memories have returned, and alliances are forming, she will meet a man from Brooklyn who was once much less than he is now.) But the Soldier knows no one. He is only an Asset.

They chance injecting her with the serum the day after the page was dated. She survives. She becomes their greatest accomplishment, aside from him.

“Why do you save me?” she asks brokenly, into thin air.


	2. One Time She Saves Him

_He makes a habit of it, over the years – saving her._

_She makes a habit of it, over the years – asking why._

_He doesn’t answer until she doesn’t ask._

VI.

Months after Hydra is revealed, a knock on the door of her current safe house, in the countryside, just outside of New York, reveals an exhausted looking Steve Rogers, supporting a slumping head of longish dark hair and an unmistakable metal arm.

Her heart sinks and she gestures them in.

Steve looks suspicious. She can’t blame him.

“Can you save him?” He sounds almost desperate.

Her breath catches, and the Mark on her left collarbone burns, but her voice comes out crisp and cool as all the time she lived in London, despite the fact that she’s now in New York, “You are both safe with me. I would stand by him to his last breath.”

Steve blinks then smiles, clearly relieved, “I believe you.”

She smiles back genuinely, “Come in, please. I’m Nic.”

Long minutes later, she is holding back tears as she is treating wounds that are all too familiar. She spares a glance at Steve, tries not to sound accusatory, “I thought he got away. I thought he was with you. How did they get him back?”

Steve looks shocked, “How do know what those wounds are from?”

She shoots him a quick glare.

He understands her silence well enough to answer instead of push, “I found him… I… I finally caught up with him. He remembered enough that he agreed to come back with me. He was remembering. He was doing so well… and, we were so careful… HYDRA managed to catch us off guard anyway. They took him back. Three days… they had him for three full days before we could get him back. I don’t know what they did to him. He was barely conscious when I made it in. He stayed awake long enough to tell me to bring him here…”

The tears disappear. She fights down the white-hot rage that boils up in their place – this is not the time for it. “We?”

Steve nods, “The other Avengers. We split after we got him out. We didn’t want to be too easy to track. The base that had him… it was stronger than the rest we’ve found since HYDRA fell.”

She nods. “Call them. They are safe here. You should not be apart now.”

To her surprise, he does just that without argument.

He reaches up to touch a place behind his left ear, “FRIDAY, track my location. Get it to the others. It’s a safe place.”

His phone rings a moment later.

She can hear Tony Stark’s distinctive voice nearly screeching through the phone, “That’s barely out of the city. How the hell are we going to be safe there? And who is Antonia James?”

Steve quirks an eyebrow at her. She smirks and shakes her head.

Steve answers calmly, “It’s an alias. She’s my soulmate.”

“Platonic.” Steve clarifies before Stark can go off the deep end. “Just get everyone here. Be careful you’re not followed.” And he hangs up before Tony can argue.

Steve is silent again before he asks, “Why here? What is he to you? Because he couldn’t have known about us.” Steve gestures between Nic and himself.

She shrugs as she continues to work; answers honestly, “I’ve never quite known. He won’t tell me.”

Steve cocks his head to the side curiously.

She takes a deep breath, hands deftly and almost mindlessly assessing and treating wounds as she answers, “He’s been saving me as long as I remember. Longer even… I didn’t find out until HYDRA began falling, but in the Red Room…. I six. I was deemed unfit – an acceptable loss. He stopped them – told them he saw potential. He made me the best I could be, then he helped me escape. No matter what they programmed him to do in relation to me… he found loop holes. He found ways around the commands. The commanded him to find me, he gave me money and weapons. The commanded him capture me, he let me escape. They commanded him to kill me, he missed. I decided I was done fighting a fight so much bigger than me… he pulled me back from the edge. My whole life, he has saved me. And every time I ask him, ‘Why do you save me?’ And every time, he walks away.”

Steve paled a bit, toward the end, but kept silent. It wasn’t his place to tell, even if he could be sure about it. So he stays silent. He helps her bundle blankets around the figure on the bed and just pulls up a chair when Nic stretches out on the bed and wraps her arms tightly around the twitching body under the blankets.

 * * *

Consciousness comes back slowly. He listens. He tries to get a grip on his surroundings. His eyes open and adjust slowly, until finally coming to a rest on a young blonde… who he knows.

She feels him shift and turns her eyes to him, hoping she’ll be a welcome sight to the over-worn soldier.

He’s groggy and disoriented, but he knows he’s safe with her. Before she speaks, he hears her voice in the back of his mind. She asked him something last time he saw her. No matter how many times they put him in the machine, he never forgot the question. He answers it before he thinks.

“You remind me I’m human.” he says.

He vaguely registers the shock in her green eyes (the same as her sister’s, he thinks) before he passes out again.

 * * *

She storms into the kitchen and shoves Steve against a wall, “You knew!”

He looks confused.

Her anger begins to abate and tears begin to form. She forces them down. She does not cry unless it is to manipulate. It was trained out of her long ago.

She points back to the door of the room, “You knew.”

Realization dawns on Steve’s face and he slumps against the wall, “It wasn’t my place to say.”

She looks broken, “How?”

He looks confused again.

Nic shakes her head and mutters in Russian, forces herself to form a coherent response in English, “He has no Mark.”

Now Steve looks sad. “It was on his left wrist.”

Her face falls. Then the rest of her body. She should hit the floor, but Steve catches her. And for the first times since she was a child, she lets herself cry. It doesn’t last long. Another knock sounds at the door and she flings it open with a gun raised before Steve can even move. One look on the other side of the door and the gun clatters to the table at the side of it.

She steps back, hands covering her mouth.

The redhead opposite her looks just as shocked as she reaches a tentative hand out, “Nicola?”

She breaks for the second time that night as she falls into her sister’s arms. “Natalia.”

 * * *

Bucky wakes slowly, the clamoring around him making him think, momentarily, he’s at the Avenger’s base, before he remembers the ambush. A rebuilt chamber. A new chair. He panics. He shoots up out of the bed, opening his eyes and searching for a weapon. The only ones he finds are the two he created, staring at him amusedly with matching green eyes.

“ _Вы знаете, кто вы_?” Natalia asks.

He nods.

“ _Ты помнишь_?”

He nods, more slowly.

“Tell me.” she demands in English.

“James Buchannan Barnes. Stevie calls me Bucky. HYDRA calls me Asset. I am, was, the Winter Soldier. They… they caught me. But they couldn’t break me this time. No matter how many times they put me in the chair. Stevie got me back again.”

Natalia nods, satisfied, and turns to her sister, “He’s all yours Nic.”

Nat moves and leans against the wall next to Steve and snags a handful of the popcorn he’s been munching on.

“ _Ты знаешь кто я_?” Nic asks quietly.

Bucky doesn’t move.

“Do you remember me?” she asks more forcefully.

Slowly, he nods, coming to a conscious decision to take what he long denied himself, “Always. You… they could never make me forget you.”

She nods. “Did you know?”

He quirks a brow in silent question.

“All those years ago, when you first helped me escape, did you know?”

He hesitates, then nods again.

She punches him, sees Steve flinch out of the corner of her eye, in the face and glares at him where he lands on the floor, “More than a decade! And you never answered me until you were delirious with fever! More than a decade I wonder why you don’t speak to me!”

He comes slowly to his feet, wiping blood away from his nose with edge of his t-shirt sleeve. He looks at the floor and shuffles his feet as he answers, human hand almost absently gripping at his metal wrist, “You deserve better than me, and I can’t prove it to you.”

She moves toward him again. She doesn’t lift his face. She tugs her t-shirt hem up and the waistband of her jeans down a bit and gently brings his metal hand to rest on the stark black Mark on her right hip. “I don’t need it.”

 * * *

Months later, she gets it anyway. Dr. Cho’s machine is incredible. It takes some convincing to get Bucky to let himself be confined to the Cradle, but the look of amazement on his face when it’s done… the way he draws his hand over the new skin fused over his vibranium arm, and the reverence with which he traces the Words that reappear along with the skin… he decides it was worth it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:  
> Вы знаете, кто вы – Do you know who you are?  
> Ты помнишь – Do you remember?  
> Ты знаешь кто я – Do you know who I am?


End file.
